My lockdown fantasy: I wish I was back in the bustling, mind-blowing beauty of Phnom Penh
From its sublime palaces and museums to its divine art deco markets, the city’s glorious architecture is lovingly captured in a thrilling new book. But can it survive a tidal wave of foreign investment?
Oliver Wainwright
Wed 3 Jun 2020 16.14 BST
Last modified on Wed 3 Jun 2020 16.16 BST

Hovering like a banana-coloured flying saucer above the dusty, congested streets of scooters and cyclo taxis, the central market of Phnom Penh is a remarkable thing. Its enormous concrete dome rises in sharply serrated steps, perforated with screens of chevron tiles, above four long streamlined arms that stretch out like the wings of a benevolent mothership, sheltering the chaotic labyrinth of market stalls below. Built in the 1930s, as a futuristic fusion of French art deco and Khmer temple motifs, it featured the second largest concrete dome in the world at the time (trumped only by the Pantheon in Rome), a fitting symbol of the Cambodian capital’s status as the “Pearl of Asia”.

I didn’t have high hopes for Phnom Penh when I arrived there on a backpacking trip in 2003, after a few days exploring the jungle temple complex of Angkor Wat and the floating villages of Tonlé Sap. I had been warned to get out of the Cambodian capital as quickly as possible and head for the coast. Almost entirely emptied of its population by the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, the city was now bouncing back as an unplanned jumble, with French colonial buildings left to rot as new development expanded outwards in an unbridled sprawl...
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesig ... phnom-penh

What lockdown?

Big Daikon wrote: ↑Thu Jun 04, 2020 10:38 am Wouldn't mind doing lockdown in PP. Can you rent BGs by the week or month?

What lockdown? Have you ever even been here? The article was about architecture, there's no need to be so crass.

For sure there are a lot worse places to be than in Cambodia right now. I'd just got back from traveling when the border shutdowns started, and if it had kicked off a few weeks earlier, I could have been elsewhere. When I see how hard it is for some people to get back I'm grateful to be here.

However, hard(er) times are coming if the economy doesn't pick up here. Businesses and schools remaining closed is not good for society in general. Too many people with time on their hands and no money. Drugs are rife.
As for the future - Will all the factories reopen ? Will the Chinese keep pouring in the money ? And when the borders open - Will there be huge migrations of unemployed people leaving Cambodia to look for work ?

Excellent article, even if a bit over-written.
Anybody not agree with this >>>

" Terry Farrell’s grotesquely clumsy Vattanac Capital tower, apparently designed to look like the arched back of a dragon, “poised to leap into a new era of prosperity”.
...... it is an empty symbol of a place still mired in kleptocracy".

Personally, i think it is the ugliest building on the planet.
(nearly)

compared to the clip-art effort next door it's a masterpiece

SternAAlbifrons wrote: ↑Thu Jun 04, 2020 12:36 pm Excellent article, even if a bit over-written.
Anybody not agree with this >>>

Yeah, maybe a little over-written although I'm partial to expressiveness that conveys a sense of the habitat. I think his choice of phrasing such as "frenetic urban melee" or even "banana-coloured flying saucer" worked ok. However, "its tree-lined streets flanked by creamy stucco piles and ornate neo-Khmer fantasies " nudged the borders of artistic license.

Anchor Moy wrote: ↑Thu Jun 04, 2020 12:32 pm For sure there are a lot worse places to be than in Cambodia right now. I'd just got back from traveling when the border shutdowns started, and if it had kicked off a few weeks earlier, I could have been elsewhere. When I see how hard it is for some people to get back I'm grateful to be here.

However, hard(er) times are coming if the economy doesn't pick up here. Businesses and schools remaining closed is not good for society in general. Too many people with time on their hands and no money. Drugs are rife.
As for the future - Will all the factories reopen ? Will the Chinese keep pouring in the money ? And when the borders open - Will there be huge migrations of unemployed people leaving Cambodia to look for work ?

Thanks for that little snapshot of reality, AM. (and those perceptive Q's on the future)
You a few other staunch souls are the envy of many of us.

Are you finding it more "pleasant" with all the bustling activity turned back a notch?